While our almost-five-year-old daughter, Elena, has come with us in the past to many ZooTunes concerts (her first live music experience ever was They Might Be Giants when she was just six weeks old), WPZ was offering an interesting new option the night of The B-52s concert: Parents’ Night Out childcare! I knew I’d be more willing to dance embarrassingly to an 80’s band without any chance of grandma hearing the next-day report of how weird I am. Elena was excited too—why hang around with mom, dad, and their friends when you can play all evening at Zoomazium?

So, I signed her up, and dropped her off at 5:00 p.m. the night of the concert. (In plenty of time, by the way, to meet my husband and friends back in line and get into the concert.) We had tons of fun at the concert, and I figured Elena must have, too—I was greeted afterwards with a firm “But I don’t want to go home yet!” The next day, when she was finished being sad it was over, I asked her to tell me all about it…

“After we made nametags, we had pizza for dinner. Cheese or pepperoni, whichever you wanted! And we met an animal we were allowed to touch!”

“It was a gecko. It felt really nice and…gecko-like. Did you know that when an animal tries to eat a gecko, it lets the animal eat its tail instead? And then the tail grows back! But sometimes, just sometimes, the gecko grows back two tails, which is silly. Our gecko had just one regular tail.”

“Then we went to Zoomazium and played. We played a lot of games, and Margaret is the silliest “Red Light, Green Light” player ever!

(Mom’s note: This was a fact I did not previously know about Margaret, who is one of our supervisors in the Education Department. How can I use this knowledge to my advantage…?)

“Also, I met new friends. One girl and I built our own bugs!”

I had to ask, of course, what she didn’t like:

“I didn’t like when you came to get me before anyone else picked up their kids. You should be late next time.”

1 comment:

My six-year-old son was there too and also LOVED it. It was so funny to read your daughter's experience because his was almost identical (please tell Margaret he gets this HUGE smile on his face when talking about the "Red Light, Green Light" game). And I will definitely let him know that we were in fact, NOT the only parents who showed up to pick up their kids. ;) He, too, told us he didn't want to leave.

I am SO glad the zoo offered this option--- because I know he had a much better time in the Zoomazium than he would have if he'd stayed with us for the concert. And meanwhile, my hubby and I had a chance to have a "date night" with great music! We'll definitely be back. :)